Jesus Principe

This essay explores the place of decency (l’honnêteté) and the decent man (l’honnête homme) in the moral and religious thought of Albert Camus. Focusing primarily on the major fictional works (The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall), we consider how Camus employs the semantic ambiguity inherent in the notion of being decent, and then develops this into a normative ethical call characterized by responsibility and solidarity. We then explore further how Camus pushes the envelope to make us reflect on whether decency is even possible, both in the sense of addressing the difficulty of taking on moral responsibility, as well as calling into question the decency of the religious mentality. We conclude with reading in Camus not so much a critique as a challenge for the Christian to be true to herself, her ethic, and her faith.

Goethe once wisely remarked, in conversation with J.P. Eckermann (1825), “[a] great deal may be done by severity, more by love, but most by clear discernment and impartial justice.” Grayling’s new contribution to the popularization of philosophy, in this respect with regard to ethics, has achieved much by way of lowering to the rank and file, the wisdom of philosophical reflections in this moving, straightforward and lucidly argumentative book. However, much space in the severity and passion of the text leaves ample room for improvement, better yet, enhancement, not so much by approaching his subjects with love as by treating the topics with impartiality.

The question initially raised in this paper was on how one’s religious sensibility affects one’s response to suffering. Focusing on three particular disasters that hit the Philippines, we look at the various media sources: the writing about the rains and flooding found in broadsheets and online media, and some ethnographic descriptions coming from the social sciences; we also look at experiential or anecdotal sources. All this provides us with material to establish certain traits and topics that come to fore in times of disaster, including such concerns as the lessons learned during disaster, the wrath of God, and points of cultural pride such as notions of solidarity and resilience. A significant upshot of this study has been the recognition of epistemic and methodological reevaluations that had to constantly be taken. This concludes in a retrieval of the contextuality of suffering, a redefinition of what it means to say that the response is a Christian one, and finally a proposal that paying closer attention to these points, in addition to non-philosophical sources, might be a way of rethinking the problem of suffering beyond the scope of traditional theodicies